Interview, Portrait of the reluctant artist

Par Jude Rogers - 15 mn

‘I’m not really into art. I just like drawing and making stuff’. Chrissie Hynde at her London studio flat.

Photograph by Gabby Laurent

From 70 s rocker to outspoken activist, Chrissie Hynde has been defying expectations for 40 years. Now she is pursuing a passion for art. She talks to Jude Rogers about the music industry, her explosive autobiography and why it took her so long to put brush to canvas

The art studio of the latest rock star to trade in the plectrum for the paintbrush is not in the most starry of locations. It’s in her fl at above a row of shops opposite a council estate in an ungentrified corner of north-west London. Her artist’s view is usually a gaggle of buses dawdling at their stops; on the afternoon I visit, a homeless man is necking a bottle of sweet wine.

Chrissie Hynde, for it is she, the shaggy-fringed, no-nonsense Pretenders frontwoman of 40 years standing, has lived here for a few years, which coincides with a time “when her life changed”, according to R...